Traditional poverty measures neglect several important dimensions of household welfare. In this paper we construct a measure of ‘vulnerability’ which allows us to quantify the welfare loss associated with poverty as well as the loss associated with any of a variety of different sources of...

We describe a measure of welfare, "vulnerability", which measures the difference between the highest feasible average level of utility in a population given aggregate resources, and the actual average level of utility. This measure can be decomposed into two components, related to inequality and...

The notion of "globalization" implies future change, and the prospect of these future changes seems likely to increase the uncertainty faced by poor households in developing countries. In this paper we use data on the changes in Lorenz curves over the last fifty years for a sample of 34 (mostly...